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Scientific Stagnation
While technology continues to grow and develop, scientific research itself is suffering a crisis. Major tenants of scientific canon have not been changed for several hundred years, leaving scientific inquiry with a sense of stagnation as fewer and fewer new ideas come out of the old ones. Worse, many of the paradigms which drove scientific progress forward hundreds of years ago are now approaching bankruptcy as new phenomena are discovered which don't correlate with long-held persuasions. Relativity Einstein's Relativity is the least endangered of the old scientific paradigms, being the primary nay-sayer against the increasingly fruitless search for FTL technology. This does not mean, however, it is without fault, particularly at the limits of what is possible. Gravitational waves as predicted by General Relativity still remain undetected, even though there is scant indirect evidence for them, but more recently actual observations of a black hole's event horizon differed from the mathematical model by almost twenty percent. Quantum Mechanics Quantum Mechanical models began to break down with the discovery of the Libidon, a particle which appears to have very complicated but predictable interactions. Libidon interactions are now thought to be responsible for phenomena such as wave-particle duality and quantum superposition, but the interactions are almost incomprehensible without an interpretive model. Evolution Evolution is simultaneously the safest and most intellectually bankrupt of the scientific paradigms. Problems were foreshadowed when the first statistical analysis of planets in the Milky Way was conducted, concluding that fewer than 100 planets in the whole of the galaxy were naturally conducive to terrestrial-like life. Search for extraterrestrial life not analygous to terrestrial life has also been fruitless, with the only positive result for life anywhere beyond Earth a bacterial colony on Mars brought by the Viking landers. Even interstellar probes have returned negatives. Worse, for several hundred years radio communication has made the Earth outshine the sun in radio, enough that radio telescopes would be able to pick up on anything remotely analygous anywhere in the fifty four Local Group galaxies. Extraterrestrial life is still commonly believed in as an uncommon occurance, but extraterrestrial intelligence is regarded as outright rare, if not nonexistent. Problems with evolution proper began in earnest in the mid-twenty first century, when evolutionary biologists began full-scale, long term evolution experiments intended to be run for decades if not centuries and produce ongoing results. Many of these experiments had promising beginnings, with selective pressures making markedly different varieties, but invariably as the experiment began to settle in, genetic defects skyrocketed, birth rates plummeted and the experimental population died out. Attempts to introduce different mutagens, pulsing selective pressures, increasing or decreasing the size of the population, and other variations of the experiment have all met with similar results, sometimes with the experimental population dying out while there are no selective or mutagenic pressures at all, like the mutagens had planted genetic time-bombs in the DNA which took several generations to go off. This results in one of the most confusing contradictions imaginable; that evolution has occurred is beyond question in the fossil record. The problem is that it cannot be effectively replicated in the laboratory because the result is always significant and swift change which comes easily, then abrupt extinction. The favored interpretation of this result is that the microbiological models of how evolution actually work were never properly tested or observed; they were assumed and rode on the coat-tails of the larger theory of evolution. The mutation and natural selection model of evolution is wrong, but it remains in textbooks because no one has come up with a better way of explaining evolution. Scientists will admit this in private, but never in public. Category:Social Context